Hmm. Well, it's my fault I suppose. I decided to try and economise by trying to move it from Easily, but I thought the smart thing to do was wait for it to expire and then pick it up again by buying it through Hostway, maybe the next day. It's not that easily aren't a good service, I've been very happy with them. It's just that 30 quid seemed a lot of money for domain name parking at the time.

What I didn't realize was that there was a 60 day cooling off period, after my account with easily had expired, when the name wasn't available for buying. And the only way to force a transfer was to pay easily the 30 quid to renew the account.

So I waited, and, well, basically, I forgot. Now carpetbaggers have blagged my domain name.

The name itself, I'm not bothered about. I've got Synaesmedia.net which I was thinking of emphasizing anyway. And I'm kind of bored with the name "synaesmedia".

The p* family of models developed by Wasserman and Pattison (1996), Pattison and Wasserman (1999), and Robins, Pattison, and Wasserman (1999) are based on the pathbreaking Markov spatial interaction models for random graphs of Frank and Strauss (1986) and Strauss and Ikeda (1990). These models allow researchers to break free of the severe independence assumptions of earlier statistical models for social networks, permitting a very general dependence structure for the network quantities. Further, the p* formulation allows network measurements to be viewed in a standard response/explanatory variables setting in which the response variable is the log odds of the probability that a relational tie is present. The explanatory variables can be quite general, including network structural properties like the tendency towards mutuality or transitivity; nominal, discrete or continuous actor attributes, as well as the interactions between these elements.

Sunday, February 08, 2004

John Robb : The lesson of 9/11 - Iraq was not lost on bin Laden. If they can sucker the US into Saudi Arabia (there are a couple ways to do this that are very counter-intuitive), we will have truly lost.

Dare Obasanjo : XML is a lousy format for most of the things it is used for. The one benefit it has is that it is widely supported and a guaranteed way to interoperate in a cross-platform manner. By tampering with this the W3C is effectively diluting one of the few benefits of using XML.

Dave Winer : Microsoft culture, even though it's PFU, has always been open to other points of view. It's part of the genetic coding. You want to give us free ideas? Sure thing, says Billg's guys and gals.

John Robb : This points to a bigger problem. It was common to pick up a book in the eighties (and even earlier) and find smart writers pointing to the coming boom in information service jobs. I don't see that type of forward thinking today as information service jobs are under pressure. What's next? I don't buy into the idea that inward looking jobs (just selling to Americans) are the wave of the future. We need something we can sell to the rest of the world.

One inadvertant strategy (that may be in process) is that we plunge the world in chaos and sell them corporate mercenary services, weapons, and more.

Dave Winer : The Dean campaign taught us that you can't use the Internet to launch into a successful television campaign to win primaries. By raising money to run ads you play into the gatekeepers, who for obvious financial reasons, have a lot at stake in the money continuing to flow through their bank accounts. At some point he wouldn't need them. If Dean didn't get it, they did. So they proved that in 2004 at least, they still get a veto on who runs for President.

Friday, February 06, 2004

My friend Jason writes : And what's with the nooranch business? I assume this is nooranch as in noosphere, a ranch of ideas or something? Are you going to chase herds of majestic ideas across the pampas and corral them at night?

Well, that's about the size of it. And well put.

Jason also informs me how profitable his online poker playing is turning out to be, as he's won around $4000 since December.

It's an activity that is so crazy and unjustifiable and unhelpful to the world that there's a sick kind of beauty to it. Plus when the hourly rate is a lot better than what you make at your "real" job, you start to ask yourself scary questions.

Indeed. Clearly writing blogs and wikis is the wrong online game to be in.

Graham : Both the UK and the US entertain the limbo area, in which we are being constantly exposed to hints and clues as to how we could be happy, but in a constant state of frustration and disappointment. ...

One plausible explanation for the outrage is that it took place in a nation that has been "educated" into thinking that sex is fine, so long as the actuality - the most natural and inoffensive parts - is to be constantly avoided.

Rather than try to convince users to start "registering" for Google, why not piggyback on one of the most viral fads going around: a social network application? And, for added effect, make it an invite only system so that you feel special once you're invited.

Monday, February 02, 2004

Human selfishness is the big question when doing alt.money simulations : do you build it in as an axiomatic assumption, and give the game to the right? Or do you leave it out as an axiomatic assumption, and risk people dismissing the work as irrelevant?

What I need is some uncontroversial, plausible, underlying behavioural axioms that can give rise to emergent selfishness in some circumstances, but not in others.

Hilan has a good intuition that it's to do with security : the more secure you feel about the future, the more generous you can afford to be, and the less you horde.